Introducing Solaread
This post describes Solaread as it was when it first launched. Reading and listening are both available now; check the current FAQ for what is supported today.
Reading in a second language is rarely just a language problem. Mostly, it is an interruption problem.
Say you are three pages into a paper due on Thursday, and a word you only half recognize stops you cold. You highlight it, copy it, jump over to a translator, paste it in, read the definition, switch back, and try to find your place again. That takes two clicks and a trip to the keyboard, and it happens thirty times in a single chapter. Every lookup is an exit from the text. For plenty of us, that exit leads to TikTok, a game, or a sudden urge to clean the desk, and the paper never gets finished.
Solaread is my attempt to close those exits.
Help that comes to the line
The basic idea is straightforward: translations should come to you, not the other way around. Solaread compares each book against an estimate of your vocabulary and glosses only the words you are unlikely to know. The gloss sits right inside the line, either in parentheses next to the word or tucked just underneath it, easing in with a subtle animation that keeps the paragraph from jumping around. If a quick gloss is not quite enough, hovering over it brings up a brief explanation tailored to that specific sentence. Move your cursor away and it disappears.
That initial estimate comes from a two-minute vocabulary check: words show up one by one, and you click Don't know or Know it. After that, the model adjusts as you go, learning from the words you save and the ones you mark as known. As you improve, it translates less and less, which is the whole point.
What the first version does
Right now, Solaread runs in the browser. A Chrome extension lets you send web articles straight to your bookshelf, and desktop and mobile apps are in the works.
What is next
The Scholar notes panel is also going to get much better at working with whatever you have open. I am building text completion that pulls directly from the paper in front of you, a profile that adapts to how you write, and notes that keep a book's key terms alongside their glosses and a direct link back to the page. Support for e-ink readers and podcast imports will come later on.
If you have been putting off a book because of all the dictionary lookups, open it in Solaread and give it a try.